Climate change significantly affects the quality characteristics of cereals. Climate factors such as accumulated temperature, daily temperature difference, rainfall and gas concentration and ratio affect the growing environment of cereals to varying degrees, leading to the changes of physiological and biochemical metabolic pathways of plants, and changes the traits of plants, which could have a series of effects on the quality of cereals. This paper summarized the research progress of different climatic factors affecting on the appearance quality, cooking quality, nutritional quality and eating quality of cereals. Many studies showed that climate factors had different effects on the color luster, particle size, grain integrity, water absorption, swelling rate, iodine blue value, solid content, microscopic changes of grain morphology, volatile components, protein, fat, starch and trace nutrients in grains. There are single and compound effects of various climatic factors on the quality of cereals, but the regulation mechanism of the compound interaction of various climatic factors still needs to be further studied.